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Monday, May 30, 2011

This Week at Observatory: An artist's investigation into the Mütter Museum's famous Hyrtl Skull Collection! Meditations on the allure and history of the Victorian bell jar featuring a show and tell from an amazing private collection!

The Hyrtl Simulacrum is a multimedia, interactive augmentation to the museum experience that makes curiosity contagious and infects others with a sense of wonder. It uses museum artifacts as the foundation for creative historical fictions. These fictions are discovered through digital forensic facial reconstructions and analog interaction with story machines.

The stories begin with 8 of the 138 human skulls that combine to make up the Hyrtl collection, found in the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia, PA. Durning the late 1800's Dr. Joseph Hyrtl wrote what he knew about each person directly onto their skulls. The Hyrtl Simulacrum grew from these short stories written directly on bone. A famous Viennese prostitute, a tight-rope walker who died of a broken neck, a child murderer and a Tai bandit are only a few of the very real people chosen from the collection to become characters in this new narrative.

Combining her love of artistic anatomy, conceptual visual narrative, history, science and good story telling, the project has grown to include high-resolution CT scans of the original skulls, vintage photography, a variety of forensic reconstruction techniques, digital painting and image editing, large wooden interactive curiosity cabinets with miniature handmade dioramas inside and much more.

You can catch a preview of The Hyrtl Simulacrum at the Kellen Gallery at 2 West 13th St., where it will be on view through May 23rd.

Jeanne Kelly is an award winning conceptual artist, designer and all around creative. Research as design, scholarship as artistic medium, institutional insertion, collective narratives, public interventions and scripted spaces are the focus of her current work. In the creation of her own work and in collaboration with others, she has utilized everything from welding, painting and wood carving to flash animation, video projection and 3d modeling. Focusing over 20 years experience in the arts, she aims to enhance the current ideas of curation through the augmentation of the museum experience through fine art, interaction and narrative. Jeanne received her BFA in Painting and Printmaking from Virginia Commonwealth University and her MFA in Design and Technology from Parsons The New School for Design.

A smoking monkey dressed as a Marquis, a Wild West scalping scene created in beeswax, a cemetery scene made from the deceased's hair, and stuffed pug dog puppies, all under glass domes!!!!!

The bell jar, or glass parlor dome, is synonymous with our memory of the Victorian Age (1837 - 1901). During the 19th century, these blown glass forms were referred to not as domes but as shades, and graced nearly every parlor, protecting a broad variety of treasures--including miniature tableaux, waxworks, natural history specimens, taxidermy of exotic birds and pets, automatons, and delicate arrangements of hairwork, featherwork, and shellwork--from dust and curious fingers.

Tonight, join parlor dome collector, scholar and author of the upcoming book Under Glass, A Victorian Obsession John Whitenight as he shares treasured objects from his more than 30 years of collecting, traces the art and history of the parlor dome in an illustrated lecture, and muses on the peculiar allure of the glass parlor dome, that extraordinarily thin bubble of glass which is at once barrier and invitation, creating an enchanted world which teases the viewer by saying, “ look at me, study me and enjoy me, but do not touch."

John Whitenight has collected antiques since he was a young boy. Along with his fever for collecting came a thirst for knowledge and a love affair with all things involving the Victorian era. Currently,his private collection consists of over 175 domes from four inches high to well over three feet high. As voracious for information as for new specimens, he has, over the years, become something of a scholar on domes and the various art forms beneath them. Feeling that this is an area that has been grossly overlooked in the study of 19th century decorative arts, Mr. Whitenight has decided it was time to put these wonderfully whimsical and eccentric Victorian concoctions into the spotlight where they belong; to this end, he is hard at work on a lavishly illustrated book on the topic entitled Under Glass, A Victorian Obsession.

You can find out more about these events on the Observatory website by clicking here; you can access these events on Facebook here. You can get directions to Observatory--which is next door to the Morbid Anatomy Library (more on that here)--by clicking here. You can find out more about Observatory here, join our mailing list by clicking here, and join us on Facebook by clicking here.

Sunday, May 29, 2011

I must confess that I have never actually read any H. P. Lovecraft's works, though I am, of course, well aware of the strong cult following he has engendered with many like-minded folk. Today I came across a link to an article about his favorite artists, and it reads--perhaps not surprisingly--like an illustrated who's who of my favorite historical artists of the fantastic and the grotesque--including Gustave Doré, Henry Fuseli and Francisco Goya--with a few great artists that I had never heard of thrown in for good measure, including John Martin, whose fantastic "The Great Day of His Wrath" (1851) you see above.

This article--by illustrator and graphic designer John Coulthart--is a terrific resource for aficionados of the gothic and fantastic in art; you can read it in its entirety (which I highly recommend!) and see lots of great images not included in this post by clicking here.

Next Friday, May 27th, you are cordially invited to a party commemorating the "awful splendor" of The great Dreamland fire of May 27, 1911, the most devastating disaster to hit New York City in the pre-9-11 era, a fire which devastated a never-to-be-rebuilt-Dreamland 100 years ago on this day.

This event will mark the premiere of the Cosmorama of the Great Dreamland Fire, a 360 degree immersive cosmorama telling the story of the great fire in pictures, sound, and light. Based on Coney Island’s great immersive disaster spectacles, the cosmorama is the product of months of labor, thousands of dollars, and the expertise of artists and artisans from the Metropolitan Opera, and uses real boards from the original Coney Island boardwalk in its construction.

The party will also feature a complementary gin bar with custom cocktails, disaster tunes of yester-year curated by The Foppinton Brothers, vintage Coney Island films, a rare appearance of the old Dreamland Bell, celebrity appearances, anatomical give-aways, myriad performances, and much more!

Wednesday, May 25, 2011

Jim Edmonson of the Dittrick Museum has just written a wonderful post on his museum blog about a rare book from the 1830s entitled Le Livre Sans Titre (The Book without a Title). This beautifully illustrated tome is a graphic warning against the perils of self-abuse, or onanism, via the tale of a healthy and handsome young man's slow decline--symptom by terrifying symptom!--under the influence of the deadly vice.

Mr. Edmonson has generously scanned the lovely hand-colored images and translated the captions from French to English, creating a kind of inadvertent 1830s graphic novel; I have republished the highlights here as a warning to young men, lest you trace this young and comely man's tragic fall and ultimate demise:

He was young, handsome; his mother's fond hope

He corrupted himself! ... soon he bore the grief of his error, old before his time... his back hunches...

See his eyes once so pure, so brilliant; they are extinguished! a fiery band envelops them

Hideous dreams disturb his slumber... he cannot sleep...

His chest burns... he spits up blood...

His hair, once so lovely, falls as if from old age; his scalp grows bald before his age....

He hungers; he wants to satiate his appetite; food won't stay down in his stomach...

His chest collapses... he vomits blood...

Pustules cover his entire body... He is terrible to behold!

A slow fever consumes him, he declines; all of his body burns up..

His entire body stiffens!... his limbs stop moving...

He is delirious; he stiffens against death; death gains strength.

At the age of 17, he expires, and in horrible torment!

As mentioned above, this is an excerpt from a larger piece; you can read the entire story on The Dittrick Museum Blog by clicking here. And click on images to see much larger, more detailed images.

Thanks very much to Jim Edmonson for making this available for public consumption!

Tonight, join Dr. Rolf ter Sluis--curator and director of the Netherlands based Groningen University Museum--for a virtual tour of the museum's historic and amazing anatomy and pathology collections. The majority of the collection consists of preparations in spirit, but also includes dry preparations where the veins have been injected with coloured wax, wax and Papier-mâché models, skeletons and skulls, preserved tattooed skin, and much more.

The core of the museum collection is drawn from the private collections of two important 18th century medical scientists, Petrus Camper and Pieter de Riemer. The collection of Camper, professor of medicine from 1763 - 1774, and his son Adriaan Gilles Camper consisted of anatomical, comparing anatomical and biological preparations, fossils, minerals and instruments. The collection was donated to the museum after Camper’s death in 1820 and there are still around 200 of his preparations in the museum collection. Another important part is the collection of the medical scientist Pieter de Riemer (1769 - 1831). He was especially interested in anatomy, surgery and obstetrics. The De Riemer collection, containing more than 900 preparations, came into the hands of the university in 1831.

Dr. Rolf ter Sluis is the Curator and Director of the Groningen University Museum. He also studied history and worked for 25 years as a registered nurse in Anaesthetics before taking on his role as curator and director of the collection.

You can find out more about this event on the Observatory website by clicking here; you can access these event on Facebook here. You can get directions to Observatory--which is next door to the Morbid Anatomy Library (more on that here)--by clicking here. You can find out more about Observatory here, join our mailing list by clicking here, and join us on Facebook by clicking here.

Monday, May 23, 2011

If the Founding Fathers wanted to visit Body Worlds they could have. Or pretty darn close, at least - they just needed to visit one of the many European cabinets of anatomical curiosities, to see the work of anatomists like Honore Fragonard.

The specimens you see above -- and more! -- are housed in the amazing Le Musée de l’Ecole Nationale Vétérinaire d’Alfort (née Musée Fragonard) right outside of Paris; to find out more about that museum, click here. Images as credited; to see more images from the Musée, click here. To visit the museum website, click here.

To celebrate (or mourn, depending on your point of view) yesterday's anti-climactic non-rapture, Morbid Anatomy has put together a very exciting week of illustrated lectures to take place at Brooklyn's Observatory! On Tuesday, join Dr. Rolf ter Sluis for a virtual tour of the underknown European anatomical collection he curates; on Thursday, author Jay Kirk will tell us the story of Carl Akeley, that "brooding genius who revolutionized taxidermy and created the famed African Hall we visit today at New York's Museum of Natural History;" and on Saturday, practicing medical illustrator Shelley Wall will discuss "how sexual anatomy, gendered bodies, and dimorphic sex have been represented in the visual discourse of medicine."

Heady stuff! Full details for all events follow; hope very much to see you there!

Tonight, join Dr. Rolf ter Sluis--curator and director of the Netherlands based Groningen University Museum--for a virtual tour of the museum's historic and amazing anatomy and pathology collections. The majority of the collection consists of preparations in spirit, but also includes dry preparations where the veins have been injected with coloured wax, wax and Papier-mâché models, skeletons and skulls, preserved tattooed skin, and much more.

The core of the museum collection is drawn from the private collections of two important 18th century medical scientists, Petrus Camper and Pieter de Riemer. The collection of Camper, professor of medicine from 1763 - 1774, and his son Adriaan Gilles Camper consisted of anatomical, comparing anatomical and biological preparations, fossils, minerals and instruments. The collection was donated to the museum after Camper’s death in 1820 and there are still around 200 of his preparations in the museum collection. Another important part is the collection of the medical scientist Pieter de Riemer (1769 - 1831). He was especially interested in anatomy, surgery and obstetrics. The De Riemer collection, containing more than 900 preparations, came into the hands of the university in 1831.

Dr. Rolf ter Sluis is the Curator and Director of the Groningen University Museum. He also studied history and worked for 25 years as a registered nurse in Anaesthetics before taking on his role as curator and director of the collection.

Kingdom Under Glass: A Tale of Obsession, Adventure, and One Man’s Quest to Preserve the World’s Great AnimalsAn illustrated lecture and book signing with author Jay KirkDate: This Thursday, May 26thTime: 8:00 PMAdmission: $5***Books will be available for sale and signing

During the golden age of safaris in the early twentieth century, one man set out to preserve Africa's great beasts. In his new book Kingdom Under Glass: A Tale of Obsession, Adventure, and One Man's Quest to Preserve the World's Great Animals, Jay Kirk details the life and adventures of naturalist and taxidermist Carl Akeley, the brooding genius who revolutionized taxidermy and created the famed African Hall we visit today at New York's Museum of Natural History. The Gilded Age was drawing to a close, and with it came the realization that men may have hunted certain species into oblivion. Renowned taxidermist Carl Akeley joined the hunters rushing to Africa, where he risked death time and again as he stalked animals for his dioramas and hobnobbed with outsized personalities of the era such as Theodore Roosevelt and P. T. Barnum. In a tale of art, science, courage, and romance, Jay Kirk resurrects a legend and illuminates a fateful turning point when Americans had to decide whether to save nature, to destroy it, or to just stare at it under glass.

Tonight, join author Jay Kirk for an illustrated lecture based on his new book Kingdom Under Glass. Books will be available for sale and signing after the event.

Jay Kirk's nonfiction has been published in Harper's, GQ, The New York Times Magazine, and The Nation. His work has been anthologized in Best American Crime Writing 2003 and 2004, and Best American Travel Writing 2009 (edited by Simon Winchester). He is a recipient of a 2005 Pew Fellowship in the Arts and is a MacDowell Fellow. He teaches in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Pennsylvania.

"It's a girl!" "It's a boy!"... The genitals, those body parts conventionally expected to remain most hidden, are also the first and most powerful shapers of our public identity. In this illustrated talk, medical artist Shelley Wall considers how sexual anatomy, gendered bodies, and dimorphic sex have been represented in the visual discourse of medicine. From early anatomical atlases through to present-day clinical illustrations and the Visible Human datasets, medical imagery has influenced ideas about sexual identity and what it means to be "normal".

Shelley Wall is a medical artist and professor in the Biomedical Communications graduate program, University of Toronto. Her research interests include biomedical representations of sex and gender, conventions in visualizing the embryology of sexual differentiation and intersex conditions, contemporary and historical visual practices in relation to women's health, and medical humanities.

You can find out more about these events on the Observatory website by clicking here; you can access these events on Facebook here. You can get directions to Observatory--which is next door to the Morbid Anatomy Library (more on that here)--by clicking here. You can find out more about Observatory here, join our mailing list by clicking here, and join us on Facebook by clicking here.

Next Friday, May 27th, you are cordially invited to a party commemorating the "awful splendor" of The great Dreamland fire of May 27, 1911, the most devastating disaster to hit New York City in the pre-9-11 era, a fire which devastated a never-to-be-rebuilt-Dreamland 100 years ago on this day.

This event will mark the premiere of the Cosmorama of the Great Dreamland Fire, a 360 degree immersive cosmorama telling the story of the great fire in pictures, sound, and light. Based on Coney Island’s great immersive disaster spectacles, the cosmorama is the product of months of labor, thousands of dollars, and the expertise of artists and artisans from the Metropolitan Opera, and uses real boards from the original Coney Island boardwalk in its construction.

The party will also feature a complementary gin bar with custom cocktails, disaster tunes of yester-year curated by The Foppinton Brothers, vintage Coney Island films, a rare appearance of the old Dreamland Bell, celebrity appearances, anatomical give-aways, myriad performances, and much more!

Monday, May 16, 2011

This Friday at Observatory, please join Morbid Anatomy in welcoming collector and museologist Cortland Hull as he shares some artifacts from his private museum of classic movie monster artifacts, shows some film clips, and provides a visual history of the actors & makeup artists behind the classic monsters. This event is part of the new Out of the Cabinet: Tales of Strange Objects and the People Who Love Them series.

Friday, May 20th may be a dark and stormy night. Brave souls normally catch the coach at midnight from the Borgo Pass to access the lawless and far off lands of Bristol, CT, spoken about in hushed tones as the home of the Witch's Dungeon. But on this rare occasion the stars have aligned and like the Baba Yaga's chicken-footed cabin, the Witch's Dungeon is coming to Observatory!

Tonight, Cortlandt Hull will be speaking about his life's work: the creation and evolution of The Witch's Dungeon, a museum consisting of life size reproductions of classic film monsters. Growing up during the 1960's monster boom, Cortlandt began construction of the Witch's Dungeon 45 years ago in the back yard of his parent's house. Over its near half century in existence, the Witch's Dungeon has continually creaked open its doors, striking chords with patrons, becoming a true piece of Americana, and attracting many of the actors and filmmakers commemorated in the museum.

Cortlandt will also be screening clips of his multiple documentary films, providing a visual history of the actors & makeup artists who created the classic films. Original head props from fantasy films will be on display along with samples of Cortlandt's work from the Witch's Dungeon.

Cortlandt Hull--artist, museologist, and film historian--began "THE WITCH'S DUNGEON CLASSIC MOVIE MUSEUM" when just 13. in 1966. It is now considered the longest running tribute to the makeup artists & actors from classic horror films. Featuring accurate life-size figures of Boris Karloff, Vincent Price, Lon Chaney, Bela Lugosi, and many others. Many of the figures are made from the actual life casts of the actor's faces Cortlandt has produced documentaries on the history of classic horror & fantasy films. Actor, Henry Hull ("Werewolf of London") was Cortlandt's great uncle, and Josephine Hull ("Arsenic & Old Lace") was his great aunt, so fantasy & horror is "in the blood"! He has lectured at universities, and film festivals, across the country, and has written for books and magazines.

You can find out more about this event on the Observatory website by clicking here; you can access this event on Facebook here. You can get directions to Observatory--which is next door to the Morbid Anatomy Library (more on that here)--by clicking here. You can find out more about Observatory here, join our mailing list by clicking here, and join us on Facebook by clicking here.

Image: Cortlandt Hull with figure of his great uncle, Henry Hull, "The Werewolf Of London"

Saturday, May 14, 2011

The Annals of Eugenics--now The Annals of Human Genetics--has just made its 1925-1954 journal content available online for researchers in the history of science and medicine. Their current issue also features four specially commissioned articles that contextualizing the content, and highlighting the ways in which Eugenics "embodies the history of human genetics as a scientific enterprise and exemplifies the complex relationship of this discipline with wider society [as well as] the somber role that human genetics played in providing what was taken to be a scientific framework to social prejudice during the period."

The Annals of Human Genetics (AHG), formerly named Annals of Eugenics, has recently made its 1925-1954 journal content available online for researchers. Among the now controversial eugenics research appearing throughout these issues, researchers can also expect to find statistical publications by mathematician Karl Pearson, whose work at University College London concerned the widely used Pearson Product-Moment Correlation Coefficient, the Pearson Chi-Square test, and P-value.

The AHG editorial cites “ongoing use and reference to materials”… “and the somewhat limited availability of the original printed copy” as justification for making the content available online. Furthermore,

"Online access to the Annals of Eugenics archive will also be of interest to historians of science. In many ways, the history of the Annals embodies the history of human genetics as a scientific enterprise and exemplifies the complex relationship of this discipline with wider society. The somber role that human genetics played in providing what was taken to be a scientific framework to social prejudice during the period of “Eugenics” is a well-known case of the complex interaction between science and society. The present issue of the journal includes four specially commissioned articles that attempt to contextualize the online publication of the Annals of Eugenics archive. To exemplify some of the major scientific contributions made during that period, the article by J. Ott highlights key papers on linkage analysis published by the journal. The contributions by K. Weiss, G. Allen, and D. Kevles deal with aspects of the history of eugenics and of human genetics, and explore their relevance to ongoing debates regarding the social implications of human genetics research."

Friday, May 13, 2011

While at the AAHM meeting in Philadelphia a few weeks ago, I met a number of fascinating folks, among them Rachel Ingold, the curator of the History of Medicine Collections at the Duke Medical Center Library & Archives. She was telling me about a wonderful exhibition on flap anatomies (images above) that will be on view there until July of this year; here is what she had to say about it:

Animated Anatomies explores the visually stunning and technically complex genre of printed texts and illustrations known as anatomical flap books. This exhibit traces the flap book genre beginning with early examples from the sixteenth century, to the colorful “golden age” of complex flaps of the nineteenth century, and finally to the common children’s pop-up anatomy books of today. The display—which includes materials from the Rare Book Manuscript and Special Collection Library at Duke University, the Duke Medical Center Library & Archives’ History of Medicine Collections, and from the private collections of the curators of the exhibit—highlights the history of science, medical instruction, and the intricate art of bookmaking.

Through the hands-on process of exposing layer after layer of anatomical illustrations, flap books mimic the act of human dissection, inviting the viewer to participate in a virtual autopsy, so to speak. Whether it’s a sixteenth-century hand-colored treatise on the layers of the eye or a nineteenth-century obstetrical guide in 3-D for performing cesareans, these books draw the viewer in. Over time, as advances in both science and printing promoted more widespread medical knowledge, anatomical flap books began to appeal to more general audiences eager to learn about their own bodies’ inner workings. Technological developments in machine printing also allowed for more colorful and precise illustrations than the hand-colored treatises of the early modern period.

A symposium was held on April 18 and we hope to have videos posted from this event soon. To learn more about the symposium, exhibit, see photos of anatomical flap books, and watch videos of them in action, visit the exhibit website. For more information, contact Meg Brown at meg.brown@duke.edu or Rachel Ingold at rachel.ingold@duke.edu. The exhibit will be up through July 17, 2011, and is free and open to the public.

This fantastic looking exhibition will be on display in the Perkins Gallery, Perkins Library, at Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, until July 17, 2011, and in the History of Medicine Gallery in the Medical Center and Archives Library from April 13-July 17, 2011. To find out more--or to pay a virtual visit!--check out the exhibition website by clicking here.

Thursday, May 12, 2011

The BBC Radio 4’s In Our Time has just produced an episode about Robert Burton's 17th masterwork The Anatomy of Melancholy; the book is essentially a 17th Century multi-disciplinary investigation of what was then known as melancholy, and, as the BBC describes, brings together "almost two thousand years of scholarship, from Ancient Greek philosophy to seventeenth-century medicine. Melancholy, a condition believed to be caused by an imbalance of the body’s four humours, was characterised by despondency, depression and inactivity. Burton himself suffered from it, and resolved to compile an authoritative work of scholarship on the malady, drawing on all relevant sources."

Can't wait to give this a listen!

You can listen to the episode by clicking here. Found on the Advances in the History of Psychology website; click here to read full post.

Image: Frontspiece to Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy, or The Anatomy of Melancholy, What it is: With all the Kinds, Causes, Symptomes, Prognostickes, and Several Cures of it. In Three Maine Partitions with their several Sections, Members, and Subsections. Philosophically, Medicinally, Historically, Opened and Cut Up, 1621

Monday, May 9, 2011

As many of you know, I have been hard at work on an exhibition called The Great Coney Island Spectacularium, which opened just a few weeks ago at The Coney Island Museum (more on that here).

As part of the exhibition, we are--with the help of scenic painters, lighting designers and prop builders from the theater and opera world--in the midst of building a new component for the exhibition, an 19th Century-style panorama/cosmorama that will allow visitors to experience the 1911 complete destruction of Dreamland by fire in an immersive 360 degree sound, sight, and light spectacular. This component is set to premiere on May 27th, the centenary of the disaster, and is inspired by the immersive disaster spectacles so popular in Coney Island around the turn of the century.

Here's the rub: immersive amusements of this sort, as we are learning the hard way, are quite expensive to produce--probably a large reason that they were put out of business by cinema!--and we are, sadly, seriously under budget.

If 19th Century-style immersive spectacles of this sort are the kind of thing you would like to experience, and you would like to help contribute towards making this project a reality, we would be so pleased to welcome your contribution! Tax-deductable donations to Coney Island USA--our mother institution--can be made by clicking here and then hitting the "Donate" button. No amount too small! All donations appreciated.

Whether you are able to donate or not, please mark your calendar for the cosmorama opening party, which will take place on the centenary of the great disaster on Friday, May 27th, 2011. Or, come experience it later; The Comorama and the rest of The Spectacularium will be on view to the public at the Coney Island Museum until April 29th, 2012.

You can find out more about The Cosmorama by clicking here. You can join our mailing list to get updates about the opening party and other events by entering your email under "events mailing list" on the upper right hand side of the webpage. You can join our Facebook group by clicking here.

Sunday, May 8, 2011

...“The Immortalization Commission” is a fascinating piece of intellectual history, exploring the intersection of science, religion, mysticism and a kind of philosophical curiosity that made the early 20th century so much more intellectually dynamic, so much more open-minded and eclectic, so much more magical than either philosophy or science is today. If contemporary god-builders — seeking to stave off death with blue-green algae, Bikram yoga and cryogenics — are more crass and materialistic than those in Gray’s story, ultimately they fail to appreciate the same point: that life seems to get much of its meaning from the fact that it ends. --The Scientific Revolt Against Death, review of John Gray's The Immortalization Commission, The New York Times Book Review

You can read the entire review of John Gray's fascinating The Immortalization Commission: Science and the Strange Quest to Cheat Death in today's New York Times by clicking here. You can find out more about the book--and purchase a copy--by clicking here.

The Brooklyn-based Morbid Anatomy Library is currently seeking a volunteer to watch over the library on Saturdays from 12-6, do a bit of book cataloging, and take on assorted odd jobs. The position would begin the weekend of May 21-22; Class credit can be worked out if applicable.

For those who have not yet visited, the Library (see photo above) is an open-to-the-public research library and private collection housing books, photographs, artworks, ephemera, and artifacts relating to medical museums, anatomical art, cabinets of curiosity, death and dying, arcane media, collectors and collecting, and curiosity and curiosities broadly considered. You can find out more information about the library here.

Friday, May 6, 2011

My good friend Petra Lange-Berndt at University College London would like to invite all of you London-based folks out there to a free and fascinating sounding lecture--as part of an equally fascinating sounding series--by one of my favorite contemporary artists, Mark Dion.

Full details on both the lecture and the series follow; hope you can make it!

Mark Dion is one of the world's foremost ecological artists. He is best known for investigating and intervening into the cultures of natural history collections through site-sensitive installations. In this slide lecture Dion will examine the ways in which dominant ideologies and public institutions shape our understanding of history, knowledge, and the natural world. The artist will address more specifically the politics of taxidermy, the preservation of animal skins, and its many practices. What kind of stories, curiosities and oddities can be unearthed from the archives of the natural history museum? How is taxidermy linked to extinction and colonialism? And what is the role of the museum in contemporary society?

More about this series:Prepared specimens appear in many guises: as monstrous or typical organs preserved in formaldehyde and kept in glass jars not unlike pickled food, as stained and fixed tissue slices, or as skilfully arranged stuffed animals. They may be found in cabinets of curiosities, in the laboratories of histologists, in anatomy theatres or in natural history collections, but nowadays equally in art galleries and the shop windows of fashionable boutiques. This project is concerned with such kinds of preserved natural objects, in particular with anatomical wet preparations and taxidermy. It explorses the hybrid status of these objects between nature and representation, art and science and studies their fabricaton, history and display.

Events

Workshop 1: Taxidermy: Animal Skin and Colonial Practice12 May 2011, 5pmKeynote Lecture – free and open to all but please telephone to book tickets on +44 (0)20 7942 5725 –